What about evidence?

I don’t understand what Tim Crane is trying to say. Maybe it’s just the usual (the ingredients of which are present): religion isn’t science, it’s about meaning; the end. Maybe, but Crane says more than that, and some of what he says doesn’t go well with “religion isn’t science, it’s about meaning.”

Atheists, he says, ask for evidence for religious claims, and reject the claims when the evidence is not forthcoming. Yes that’s right. Then he says in their view those claims are

a bit like scientific hypotheses. In other words, they are claims — like the claim that God created the world — that are supported by evidence, that are proved by arguments and tested against our experience of the world.

Yes, but it’s not just scientific hypotheses that match that description. Crane at one point admits this.

It is absolutely essential to religions that they make certain factual or historical claims. When Saint Paul says “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain” he is saying that the point of his faith depends on a certain historical occurrence.

Theologians will debate exactly what it means to claim that Christ has risen, what exactly the meaning and significance of this occurrence is, and will give more or less sophisticated accounts of it. But all I am saying is that whatever its specific nature, Christians must hold that there was such an occurrence. Christianity does make factual, historical claims. But this is not the same as being a kind of proto-science.

But it doesn’t need to be “a kind of proto-science,” whatever that may mean; but it is still a matter of evidence. Factual, historical claims depend on evidence, and if the evidence is not there, then the claims are just bogus. If the evidence is disputed, the claims are disputed. If the evidence has been faked, the claims are blown out of the water and the claimant may be disgraced, or may just be suspended for a year with pay. At any rate the evidence matters, and without it, all you have is stories. This is an important point, and Crane has put it at the center of what he’s saying, but he never actually makes it again. I don’t understand why.

He turns the whole thing into a false choice between science on the one hand and religion on the other, ignoring the great swath of empirical inquiry that’s not science but nevertheless depends on evidence. Why does he? I really don’t know.

It is true, as I have just said, that Christianity does place certain historical events at the heart of their conception of the world, and to that extent, one cannot be a Christian unless one believes that these events happened. Speaking for myself, it is because I reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that I consider myself an atheist. But I do not reject these claims because I think they are bad hypotheses in the scientific sense. Not all factual claims are scientific hypotheses.

But they don’t have to be; you still reject them, when there is no evidence, for reasons. You reject these claims – don’t you? – because you think they are bad hypotheses in a broader sense, and you think that because there is no evidence to back them up…don’t you? You say it is because you reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that you consider yourself an atheist, and you reject the factual basis of the doctrines because there is no evidence for them – don’t you? So why make such a point of the “scientific” aspect while not mentioning the lack of evidence?

Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

Maybe so, but the claims are false (in the sense that there is no evidence for them) and so, according to Crane, the religions fail. Saying the commitment to meaningfulness is what is central doesn’t change that.

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34 Responses to “What about evidence?”

what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

It is not the meaningfulness of the world that is important here but the presuppsoition that the world has some kind of meaning. This may be integral to “human nature” and as a result we accept the apparent validity of the supposed questions religions purport to answer until we think aboutthem carefully.

When Christians express their belief that “Christ has risen,” for example, they should not be taken as making a factual claim, but as expressing their commitment to what Wittgenstein called a certain “form of life,” a way of seeing significance in the world, a moral and practical outlook which is worlds away from scientific explanation.

Christ. What is he saying here other than that we need to recognize religious truth claims as a form of delusion? And why is it, again, that we really need to respect this? Crane claims to try and locate what seem to me some significant differences between science and religion, but the best he seems to come up with is that religion is indifferent to evidence. I think we knew that.

Heh. Just as I thought – “Maybe it’s just the usual (the ingredients of which are present): religion isn’t science, it’s about meaning; the end.” But he confuses the issue by admitting that there are factual historical claims and that they do matter – and then by not admitting that there is no evidence for them and that that matters.

Until I saw the TV film about the Lost Tomb of Jesus (quite credible stuff IMHO) I believed that the Resurrection and Ascension were pretty central to the whole Christian story. But on that film some theologian or other said that it did not matter if Earthly remains of Jesus were found, as his spiritual resurrection was what was important.

It seems to me that with the Ascension and Ressurection the story is a supernatural one, and without them it is natural and in that context quite ordinary. An exceptional religious leader was put to death by the Romans in a rather unexceptional Roman manner. End of story.

Crane’s statement that: “When Christians express their belief that ‘Christ has risen,’ for example, they should not be taken as making a factual claim… [blab… blab… blab…]”, I see him as saying much the same thing.

I think he’s saying that fact-claims are central for both science and religion, but serve different purposes. Religion uses fact-claims to inflate a sense of mystery, while science uses fact-claims to deflate it.

The difference is, you can make fact-claims without being sincere in them. To make a fact-claim is not the same as to be committed to the facts. The very point of a dogma is that you are committed to the fact of something that cannot be proven.

Religion is trying to have its cake and eat it. They’ll say if such and such isn’t true, our entire edifice will collapse, but they don’t need evidence to make it true and evidence going in the opposite direction is dismissed. What’s dishonest is the stance that the truth of their belief might depend on something.

I read him as pointing to something I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about recently. There’s been a bit of a trend in philosophy, particularly following the whole Gettier Problem buisness, to draw a distinction between what constitutes knowledge, actually knowing something is the case, and our practice of justification. For example knowing the the earth revolves around the sun but not having the slightest clue how to prove that it does. I’m confident that I know the earth revolves around the sun, because I’m confident about the epistemology of the people who tell me this, but I haven’t the slightest clue how I would argue that. (For anyone who does know I’d be damn interested to find out.)

Now I realise that distinction can seem trivial because we all intuitively grasp the distinction between the two but I’m behind for example Stephen Neale when he asserts that a lot of the problems that occur not only in epistemology but in a lot of Philosophy are because of mistakes in keeping this distinction clear. Where this gets tricky is that it raises questions about the nature of belief, the nuts and bolts of mental content. This is where I read Crane as coming into the discussion, which he does make clear isn’t a defence but more of a taxonomy, he’s pointing out that there’s a difference between the commitment underpinning the actual content of those beliefs and without understanding that difference we won’t get any traction with the discussion. I’m not completely convinced by his account because I still think that mental content doesn’t make sense without a commitment that it’s about the world, but I am very conscious of the fact that this is not actually a very easy case to make.

I am reminded of two things – one is that I am not entirely sure that the extreme relativist interpretation of “forms of life” is correct. It always struck me as that it could apply to humans a whole. That aside, all this worrying about factual meaning is just one step away from the “religion is poetry” thesis, which should satisfy no believer and mollify no skeptic. (The same was claimed about Heidegger to me once. Well, then, his work is bad poetry, and so much for that.)

I think Crane makes a very simple mistake. He says he wants to understand what religion is, what it is like, so he compares and contrasts the way people respond to science, and the way that they respond to religion. First of all, he recognises that most of us, while we accept the conclusions of science, do not understand how it’s done. Science requires an intense apprenticeship. There’s no way in without knowing a lot. But religion, he thinks, is different. Here’s the crucial turning point:

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly: they are ad hoc, they are arbitrary, they rarely make predictions and when they do they almost never come true. Yet the striking fact is that it does not worry Christians when this happens.

What’s my point? Simply this. Most people accept scientific hypotheses/theories on the strength of the evidence, but few people, Crane thinks, take a deep interest in science. This is something that might be questioned. But the point is that he contrasts this lack of interest with the interest that millions take in religion, and he thinks this is what makes the difference.

What religion is is completely different to science in that evidence, for religion, is apparently unconnected to religious belief. Religious people may make evidence claims, but they are not deeply concerned if the evidence fails to support the conclusions, if they make predictions and the predictions come out wrong. Science, on the other hand, depends upon evidence, yet most people take little interest in sussing out the bases for scientific conclusions.

I think it is a distinction without a difference. The truth is that most people accept ‘common knowledge’ on the basis of authority, and let the experts argue it out, no matter what field of knowledge is in question. Religious people are told, day in and day out, that the experts have it all in hand. (I can speak about this part, at least, with some authority.) Making a parade of names of religious authorities is common procedure, and, of course, at the basis of it all is a book which is taken as itself authoritative, whatever the evidence. The book itself qualifies as evidence. Clergy deliver sermons that speak of the scholarly study of religion, the Bible, doctrine. The ulema, for Muslims — the Muslim scholarly fraternity — represents the authoritative synthesis of Muslim beliefs, gathered over generations. Very few believers take an interest in this, just as they take little interest in trying to produce good reasons for their scientific beliefs.

The difference lies in the apparent relation of religious belief to ordinary living. Of course, everyone knows that scientific conclusions are vital to he lives we lead. The trust we put in airplanes, cars, computers, stoves (cookers for the English), gives the lie to Crane’s idea that we lack an interest in science. Our interest in science is in whether or not it works. The same applies to people’s interest in religion. No deep understanding is required. All we need to know is that it works, and people’s living with religion day in and day out seems to suggest that it does. Turn on the computer in the morning, and, hey, presto! there’s an image on the screen. Kneel down beside your bed at night, and, hey, presto! there you are, in communion with god, even though you know as little about religion as you do about science.

The real difference is that, if you do seek to know about religion, and actually work through the evidence on your own, asking youself, each step of the way, whether it really takes you to the conclusions that religion has taught you all through the years, you find that the evidence doesn’t really work. That most people don’t do this should come as no surprise. And that the clergy don’t come to the same conclusion — because, after all, they’re supposed to know, and have done the working out for themselves — is largely because study of religion takes place in hermetically sealed compartments, called seminaries, madrassas, etc.

The mistake Crane makes is to suppose that we have here two different kinds of activity, one that demands evidence, and one where the evidence is of only marginal importance or interest. That’s not true. It’s just that nothing breaks down if religious evidence doesn’t support the beliefs, whereas, if science gets it wrong, bridges fall down, airplanes fall out of the sky, people’s diseases are not healed, and disaster would loom. Of course, the same thing applies to religion too, but no one thinks that that’s religion’s fault. True Christianity is only good, and Islam is, after all, the recipe for the perfect society. The fact that religion leads to disaster after disaster doesn’t go into the column against religion, but science’s failures are not only testable, but can often be litigated as well.

Turn on the computer in the morning, and, hey, presto! there’s an image on the screen. Kneel down beside your bed at night, and, hey, presto! there you are, in communion with god

The reasons one turns on one’s computer in the morning are somewhat different to the ones normally applied to kneeling at one’s bedside. Uncertainty and fear about what might lie on the other side of death are prime motivators there. If your computer doesn’t work, you’ll know almost instantly and do something about it, like call a technician. And if he wants to put bread on his table, he won’t tell you “You’re not supposed to know for sure if it works or not till after you’re dead.” However, there are people who get to put a lot more than just bread on their tables by giving you precisely that line, not about something as trivial as a piece of electronic equipment, but about your entire existence for the rest of eternity.

Montag: Aristarchus of Samos (310 BC – ca. 230 BC) put forward the first recorded heliocentric model, and it was of the Universe, not just the Solar System. He supposed the stars to be very much further away from us than the Sun. He also probably observed or knew of the annaual cycle of stars, which gradually progress overhead when viewed at the same time of night, and from which ancient astronomers and observers derived the signs of the Zodiac. It is for this reason that the winter sky is so different from the summer sky.

Babylonian astronomers concluded that it takes 360 days for the Sun to return to a starting position relative to the stars (ie for Earth to make one sidereal revolution), which is apparently why they decided to allocate 360 degrees to a circle. (360 ~ 365). I find it hard to believe that they did not have a heliocentric view, but am not sure on that score.

@ Stewart. Is religion really about eternity? It’s certainly about fear of death. But I don’t think the differences between scientific believing and religious believing are all that great, structurally. Emotionally, they may have a different hold on us, though I challenge anyone not to be personally destabilised by the experience of an obstreperous computer. Of course, religion and computers are different things. Religion plays a central role in one’s life, much like getting married does, so it’s effect is wider, certainly, in the aspects of life that are affected, and perhaps its reach is deeper, too, since our religious beliefs often trace back to childhood and experiences of threat and security.

And are the reasons all that different anyway? Turning on the computer is a way of keeping in touch, of reaching out beyond oneself to the world, giving one a sense of being more than just an atom in the void, but a functioning part of a larger project. Prayer is very much like that, which is why churches develop ‘prayer chains’, ‘prayer groups’, and so on.

And then, of course, lose your electricity for a few days, though, and you’ll find out just how important all those electrical gadgets are in the scheme of your life, how they connect you to the rest of the world, and how dependent you are, and how emotionally frayed you will get by the end of it! My point is only that Crane wants us to think that evidence plays a different role in religion to the one it plays in science. This is only partly true, in the sense that it’s much harder to pin down the evidence for religious beliefs, so that the beliefs themselves can often escape unscathed from the breakdown of prediction or proof. Then we can always slip away into mystery, as Crane notices, and scientists, in the end, can’t do that.

But I think, for all that, Crane misunderstands the role that evidence plays. That’s why so many people lose their faith over matters of evidence. The suffering of someone who is deeply loved, the experience of the callousness of religious morality to people and their experiences of distress, the failure of religion to accommodate the diversity of ways of being human, and the cruelty that this leads to: these are all situations where the evidence for religion simply breaks down. That doesn’t of course mean that many people don’t continue to believe in spite of apparent evidence agaisnt belief. It’s just that, in those cases, the evidence isn’t taken to be decisive, because we are emotionally much more attached to religious beliefs than we are scientific ones, though the case of Marc Hauser is a cautionary tale. Scientific beliefs can get into out emotional systems too, and play havoc with our believing.

Besides, religions have developed whole departments of thought to deal with the breakdown of faith. They speak of ‘dry periods’, periods when god is simply not there. Think of Mother Teresa, and her inability to believe, and the spiritual advice that was given to her, that the greatest sacrifice is continuing with belief even when belief has become impossible. But this doesn’t show that evidence is unimportant; it just shows that religion has learned how to deal with the breakdown of evidence. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe. The relations are very complex, but they are there.

And in the end, of course, there’s the threat, the threat of social ostracism (or worse), and the threat of eternal fire. I still think Crane’s distinction is one without a difference, or at least without much of one. Without any evidence at all religious belief would simply collapse. It’s absolute crucial to the way that religion is practiced.

You have acknowledged some of the differences between the two cases – and I think there’s also one between losing electricity for a few days and being dead for a few days. The fear may be of death more than lack of eternity, whereas eternity is the sales pitch.

And are the reasons all that different anyway?

Maybe someone indulging in both wouldn’t think so and it’s true that many computer-users don’t understand much of the science behind it. But wouldn’t someone actively engaged in prayer insist that she/he is doing more than just reaching out to be a part of something bigger? I have no problem with that being part of it, but I could imagine a believer could point to a few differences between kneeling in prayer and posting something in their Facebook status bar. And if the believers themselves would consider it different, it’s not a point I’d care to argue with them, even if I think they’re affecting more in the universe via FB than they are on their knees.

Very odd. He basically gets all of the logic right, all the way up until his conclusion. He acknowledges that religion must make factual claims in order to matter, and even seems to acknowledge that these factual claims are clearly false — and then says that outspoken atheists are wrong anyway. Wha???

@Eric: You say, “No deep understanding is required. All we need to know is that it works, and people’s living with religion day in and day out seems to suggest that it does. Turn on the computer in the morning, and, hey, presto! there’s an image on the screen. Kneel down beside your bed at night, and, hey, presto! there you are, in communion with god, even though you know as little about religion as you do about science.”

I think I understand your point, but…. So no deep understanding of technology or the science behind it is needed for me to be “in communion” with my computer. And a believer need not know much about religion to think herself “in communion with god.” But do we agree that said “communion” or the act of bending on one’s knees doesn’t tell the believer that religion “works” in the same sense that turning on my computer tells me that science does because nothing happens in the first instance, except of course that the believer might delude herself into thinking that a prayer is answered? I suppose you may say, well, to the believer it’s not pretense; they believe it works. “How” is not important and that’s the point, right? But help me understand how the average believer’s experience with religion day in and day out is confirmation that religion works without need for deeper understanding in the same sense that my experience with my computer confirms that science works without my need to know the science behind it. The analogy is problematic for me. (Perhaps merely because it’s too early in the morning!) What about the element of pretense or ritual–or something else–that’s required by one and not required by the other? (And if you’ve already answered that before this post is posted, my apologies!)

Stewart, Rosanna …. I’m not sure that the analogy is tight, but then analogies never are. However, the point of departure is the fact that religions themselves use analogy. We can only know god by analogy, after all, which is why dear old Karen Armstrong gets to go all woolly when it comes to god, and disappear, surreptitiously, into nothing!

I take my departure also, in a rough sort of way, from Denett’s idea of belief in belief. What do people who pray experience? I don’t know, though I’ve prayed. Did it professionally for years! People trust that there is an experience so much that researchers, researching religious experience, tell nuns to have religious thoughts, and then they do MRIs of their brains, and that is supposed to map religious experience. But do nuns, especially, have religious experiences? They could have done that with M. Teresa, and they shouldn’t have been able to get a result, but I’m sure they would. And who would have thought that sequences of on/off signals could produce the results that you are seeing on your screen as you read this? And do you understand how it’s done? I thought not.

Religion works because people tell each other that it works. The illusion is produced by groups of people all of whom say that they have religious experiences when they do certain things. And indeed, something like the way people moving through an art gallery have sequences of experiences, people in the context of the liturgy have experiences too. I don’t know if you could pin point them and say: this is what I mean by religious experience. That’s the problem with experience. It’s solipsistic unless you have a language to talk about it. Read James’ Varieties to see how diverse experiences can be and still be called religious. But, there is a shared illusion (if you like, using that word loosely) that religion actually works. How poorly it works is often made clear to clergy when people ask disconcerting questions, which shows that very often the illusion hasn’t worked for them. But hymns, ceremony, ritual acts, incense, candles, language, all contributes to an experience which people in some sense “share”. So, in this sense it works. And we know it works because, after it is over, people will speak about the kind of experience it was for them, and there is a sense that it was a shared experience. This is very common.

And when we feel that it is all really pointless, we just try harder. We try harder to convince ourselves and others that there really is some point to what we are doing. Think about what we’re doing right now. In some sense, what I write here doesn’t make a lot of difference to the world. My logging on to the computer in the morning is a way of plugging in to the experiences of other people, to their thoughts, feelings, etc. It gives me a sense that I am not all on my own thinking thoughts in isolation, but that others are, somehow, thinking along with me. Sure, we may have disagreements, but there is something about being linked to something greater than yourself. That’s precisely what religious people sense too. They think it has to do with god. I think it has to do with joining a commons, as it were, linking into a web of believers that contributes to the illusion of a common experience.

Where does evidence come into it? Well, for religious people, if there were no basis in experience, no evidence at all that people had religious experiences, or that those experiences were linked somehow, not just to a story, but to a history, religious experience would remain isolated, uninterpreted. It’s the apparent evidence that gives religious experience its ground and shape. In the end, of course, the appeal to evidence is very weak, since a book can constitute, for the religious, all the evidence they need. But if none of the stories in the book were true. If it could be shown that Jesus never lived, that the story was made up from whole cloth right from the start, that the book of stories that is accepted as foundational is as open to question as any other book is, then the religious experience would simply die. It just would. People keep the faith, by keeping faith with the stories. Even someone like Don Cupitt, in a recent interview, used Jesus as an authority. If you read his books you have to wonder how that is possible. But the story of Jesus is foundational. It has to have authority. And so it does.

There’s actually nothing in your comments that I disagree with. I personally think that evidence, and more generally epistemology, actually constitutes something very important about the nature of beliefs and in this I’m following the hallowed and apparently discredited example of the logical positivists.

You’ll forgive me if this is wrong because I’m not completely certain on this account so I’d welcome anyone who knows the story better than me to correct me, but from what I can tell the positivists were taking advantage of Tarski’s famous disquotational theory of truth. The assertion is that truth amounts to the difference between “the snow is white” and the actual fact of snow being white. What this shows is that what makes a particular claim true is very closely related the meaning of the words being used. It’s from this that you get the assertion that I still feel the pull of, that if a person can’t demonstrate what would show a claim to be true, they do not understand the meaning of the words; “it’s literally nonsense” as AJ Ayer puts it.

Now the objection which gets thrown at the positivists is that it’s impossible to get clear enough about the meaning of terms in order for that view to avoid being self-defeating; Godel’s Slingshot is the standard version of this argument in that it points out there’s an infinite regress in terms of there needing to be a second language in order to describe the first set of terms and therefore a third language to describe the second etc.

A bigger problem comes from Quine and his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In that particular essay Quine challenges not specifically meaning, but the idea of the Analytic and of the A Priori. The most troubling part for me is his challenge to the analytic. What this effectively attacks is my ability to say things like a bachelor is an unmarried man and where this causes problems is that in order for me to assert that beliefs points to facts about the world in the manner the positivists suggest, I need to perform that exact sort of analysis. This means my ability to respond to someone who has a different intuitive grasp of the nature of the content of a belief is limited; I don’t have the intuitively satifying option of simply saying beliefs aim to be true by definition and leaving it at that.

It reads to me as if that this is roughly the area of debate Crane is highlighting and it’s a legitimate one. Get past it though and it’s pretty much full steam ahead positivism so maybe we can accuse him (and me!) of nit picking. At the very least he’s being more critical of the New Atheists than he needs to be because it’s certainly not unreasonable to think that this is a hurdle it’s possible to overcome.

Bugger, the problem with big posts being you miss other discussions going on behind them.

Eric:

The belief about belief stuff is very important I agree with you, this however touches on the other point I raised briefly. On the one hand we’ve got a metaphysical question about what constitutes knowledge and that’s where we get bogged down in very technical questions about meaning and content. Now my position there is that ultimately the metaphysics of knowledge states basically by fiat that knowledge just is when we have a belief that is caused by the world to match the world. There is however a very big gap in this account and that is what actually happens when people get down and discuss evidence.

Yes having an argument with a friend can cause you to know about the world by introducing a link between you and beliefs about say a discussion with their boss; the fact remains that these kinds of discussion tend to have more of a normative tone than a strictly epistemic one. This is a useful distinction to remember because it means that for us rationalists we can point to the metaphysics of knowledge to explain why say a double blind trial is better than a personal anecdote; it even provides a pretty good response to the “truth/justification just is” types like your garden variety pragmatist such as Richard Rorty. The caveat is that we need to be very careful not to mix the two up.

I wonder if what Eric is talking about is basically learning and unconscious processing. Maybe religion is like walking, skating, riding a bike – you learn it and after that you don’t think about it any more, you just do it. A research psychologist here at the Univ of Washington calls it Level 1 and Level 2 – obvious but useful. Once something is on Level 2 it takes a trip (or many) to Level 1 to discover flaws in it and so on. Many people just don’t go to Level 1 – this is religion “working” because they “know” it.

But is his metaphysical point as tied up with philosophical logic as you suppose? I don’t think that I was making a normative point. I think that religious people really believe they are talking about reality. When they pray they are praying to something. When they say that Jesus rose from the dead I think they are saying that he actually did rise from the dead. Of course, the interpretation of this has always been in some dispute, but generally resurrection does not mean just raised to eternal life — though of course that is what it is — but raised to eternal life and visible in this one. So, as an eschatological event it is also an empirical event, or else our faith, as Paul says, is vain. (Although I think, frankly, that Christians still have a problem of interpretation, since this means that, as Son of God, even the risen Jesus is bodily, and that does seem odd, since it was spiritual being that was, in some sense, incarnate in Jesus.) As always, the evidence is a bit thin on the ground, whatever our analysis of truth is. It wouldn’t take long to get me lost amongst Tarski, Quine, Kripke and the rest.

So, the point is an epistemic one, and includes the role that evidence plays in warranted assertabililty. And I don’t think Christians or Jews or Muslims, to take the monotheisms, think that evidence is an unimportant thing. I don’t think they sit loose to evidence, though they may consider as evidence things that only have a very dubious ontological status. But Crane seems to suggest otherwise, and that religious people don’t really think in terms of knowledge at all. Scientific beliefs depend upon very complex chains of evidence, religious beliefs don’t, and that doesn’t seem to trouble religious people. Well, I think that it does trouble them, and the chains of evidence that they produce — just read some of the early theologians, or some contemporary ones, for that matter — are much more complex and subtle forms of thought, and more difficult to understand (if intelligible at all) than much science. And religious people take this on trust just as much as they take on trust the fact that the earth rotates round the sun, and religion is no more widespread than belief in this simply astronomical fact.

As a priest one of the commonest questions I received was: “What do we believe?” Take note of the pronoun. What we believe is what the church teaches, and what the church teaches is what the church’s teachers (systematic and dogmatic theologians) work it out to be. And the complex trains of reasoning which constitute theological explanations are as dependent upon evidence as the most rigorous scientific theory and its experimental outworking, only the evidence lies in experience, in history, and in the Bible (or the Qu’ran, depending on your taste in monotheisms). When you look at all this from inside it makes perfect sense. It’s a self-contained universe, and nothing seems more important. Some theologians are more difficult to understand than others, and there are the point people on the spot whose job it is to explain it to the rest. One of the most obscure theologians is the present Archbishop of Canterbury. Some of his books are virtually unintelligible, even to a reasonably well-read theologian. But when someone preached sermons that no one understood, the comment was usually that the preacher was very learned, a deep thinker, very devout. So, presumably, though you could not understand, you could take his word for it.

The point though is that at the centre of all this there are reasons for believing, and if there weren’t, then one just wouldn’t be able to believe. A very important point in all this is the fact that some people cease to believe, and most of those who cease to believe do so because they can no longer convince themselves that the beliefs are true, that there is enough evidence. Also, closely related, is the belief that religious beliefs are dangerous and cause harm to people, despite the fact that the beliefs are supposed to be of a good god whose only care is what is good for his ‘children’. Crane’s point may be more philosophically involved than this, but I don’t think so. And now I have to for a TV interview, so I must close.

The real difference is that, if you do seek to know about religion, and actually work through the evidence on your own, asking youself, each step of the way, whether it really takes you to the conclusions that religion has taught you all through the years, you find that the evidence doesn’t really work. That most people don’t do this should come as no surprise. And that the clergy don’t come to the same conclusion — because, after all, they’re supposed to know, and have done the working out for themselves — is largely because study of religion takes place in hermetically sealed compartments, called seminaries, madrassas, etc.

That, and it is easy for clergy to become so thoroughly invested that they consciously refuse to work through the evidence. I imagine it’s rather difficult to tell your family that you are dropping out of seminary. At least one of the participants in the Dennett and LaScola study acknowledged that he lost his faith in seminary but didn’t know what else to do. I’ve long suspected that we under-estimate the number of nonbelievers in religious communities. People are brought up to believe that their faith is Good and True. When they realize that it isn’t true, they still hold on to its being good. In any event, a lot of the hostility directed toward new atheists has a Don’t you know that I’m not a suspicious fool? quality to it.

Ken, did you mean superstitious? (instead of suspicious) I think you’d find that a lot of clergy go through the steps and conclude, as the chap in the Dennett study did, that the steps don’t get you to the place where you should be, but there’s a big investment involved, time, resources, emotional investment, plus a lot of recognition from family, faith community, etc.: that’s a lot just to give up.

Over the years I watched people go into seminary, and then come out. Very few of them changed. If they went in with simple Sunday School beliefs, that’s the way they came out, more or less, with an armamentarium of critical skills, and no idea what to do with it. So, the people got good, straightforward, classic Anglicanism, right out of the dogmatic texts, or modern fundamentalism of the Alpha Course variety. But there are, I believe, a large number of priests who end up without real belief, but with no alternative but to go on, the personal investment is just too great. They are unhappy, divided, and are burdened with a heavy sense of failure and dishonesty. The church makes no provision for them.

For myself, I thought there was room for a liberal Anglicanism, a critical, yet still rather traditional, story governed way of looking at the world, where the myths were just myths, and the stories just stories, but, like literature, could be used to enrich one’s life. But that’s not the way religion works. Crane is wrong. Religion is earnest and zealous and committed, and myths alone can’t feed that. They’re just myths, after all, and once they’re broken myths (in Paul Tillich’s sense), they are of no more use to religion. The motor in religion is belief, and the beliefs are beliefs in real things, real gods, real messengers, real miracles, and real immortality. And, like it or not, it depends on evidence and always has. That’s why science is such a threat. Because, take belief away and religion crumbles inside. It can keep going for awhile, and some people can keep it going for a lifetime, but the beliefs are always there, always haunting and restless, and they all come back in the end, because they’re written down, and doubters die.

Yes, I meant superstitious. So many writers on religion seem highly incensed by the possibility that new atheists might lump them in with actual believers in supernatural agency.

I’d be grateful, Eric, if you would further indulge my interest in Anglican apostasy, especially among clergy. It seems like it must be awfully common. (Wasn’t there a prominent archbishop in recent years who spoke of theism as inessential to the faith?) Is it something that one is not supposed to acknowledge under any circumstances, or is alright to acknowledge it to peers but not to congregants? You suggest that non-theist Christianity is a futile dream (and I’m inclined to agree), but are there a significant number of dreamers?

“And that the clergy don’t come to the same conclusion — because, after all, they’re supposed to know, and have done the working out for themselves — is largely because study of religion takes place in hermetically sealed compartments, called seminaries, madrassas, etc.” More than this, I think, Eric. The priesthood (by which I mean all clergy, through all of recorded history) has found that battening on human fears and uncertainties is a simple way to make a good living. No parasite would willingly give that up, no matter where the evidence leads.

At least we have not been subjected to more quantum flapdoodle, although this seems to be some other variety — philosophical flapdoodle, perhaps.

In all this fog of words, Crane seems to have missed a basic point: the only reason why large numbers of people care about religion is because they think it will have a real impact on their lives — if not in this world, then at least in some (hypothetical) other world. No one really gives a damn about deism.

If, as you say, “it is about meaning” then what, even if do you accept that claim as valid?

What does the “meaning” rest upon? How can one judge what is meant, and to whom, and by what criteria should one examine that supposed meaning? If not empirical, observable facts and evidence, then what?

Crane ‘s point seems to hinge on two assumptions: (1) that only science can dispel religious thinking, and (2) that science is inaccessible to most people. Without splitting hairs about the second (most people supposedly learn basic science by the time they enter high school), it’s the first assumption that fails egregiously — as you immediately spotted, Ophelia.

I’m a scientist now, but it was as a kid that I first said to myself, “You know what — this stuff makes no sense at all!” That step doesn’t require in-depth knowledge of integral calculus or particle physics; all it takes is a basic effort to see if there’s any internal consistency in what’s being fed to you. Once a child catches his or her parents in at least one lie, then pretty soon the realization dawns that, as a general rule, the things grown-ups tell you are not necessarily things that are true.

The priesthood (by which I mean all clergy, through all of recorded history) has found that battening on human fears and uncertainties is a simple way to make a good living. No parasite would willingly give that up, no matter where the evidence leads.

And here’s an excellent example. Cottingham’s thesis seems to be that unless you are willing to assert as true what you know to be false, you cannot be a good person.

By the way, I think that an understanding of parasitism – how it is selected and constrained – can inform a great deal of life. I’ve always thought that a guide to successful consultancy parasitism would sell well in the business section of the bookstore.

Well, religion is “about meaning” in the same sense that everything is “about meaning,” right? I could make a not-entirely-silly argument (and people have) that baseball is “about meaning.” Let’s see, what else? Poetry—yep, poetry is definitely “about meaning.” Language is also “about meaning.” Can anyone think of a human endeavor that could not be said to in some sense be “about meaning”?